Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s

Avant-Garde is a mixed blessing for a couple of reasons: on the one hand it's a comprehensive collection of many of the most important and influential short films to emerge from the Surrealist and Dadaist movements of the '20s and '30s, primarily from Europe (especially France) but also from the U.S. and elsewhere. As such, this two-disc compilation of 24 films is a perfect one-stop showcase for cinephiles wishing to explore some of the most unique and unusual examples of film-as-art during the transition of silent film to sound. The downside is that no matter how interested you are in the experimental output of obscure and well-known artists of the period (including Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Joris Ivens), there's no escaping the fact that some of these films have grown so esoteric that they're little more than curiosities from a bygone age. The value of the set comes from its completeness: culled from the collection of legendary film archivist Raymond Rohauer, the eclectic mix guarantees a splendid variety of form and structure, from the abstract expressionism of Fernand Leger's Ballet Mechanique (1924) to the playful surrealism of Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey's Life and Death of 9413--A Hollywood Extra (1928), which combines an absurdist style of acting with brilliant, low-budget expressionism created with cardboard cutouts on a tabletop. There's an abundance of this visual ingenuity on display--many of these films could be considered the MTV of their day--and along the way you'll also find some historically valuable oddities such as The Hearts of Age, a surrealist experiment directed by Orson Welles six years before Citizen Kane. The films all look very nice and come with newly composed scores and film notes by Elliott Stein. Likely to have small public appeal but important for archival film collections, this is recommended. (J. Shannon)